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Saturday, June 14, 2014

Activism Looks a Lot Like Self-Indulgence

I am an artist and I have a confession.

Recently I went to a small arts and makers collective in Las Vegas, NM and heard a lecture from a member of a Los Angeles based arts organization whose focus is on time based, interactive projects with the goal of allowing people look at culture from a different perspective. I purposefully left out the names of these organizations because this confession has little to do with them. What I really want to talk about is a general trend I see in contemporary art and cultural organizations around the country, but especially in cities that consider themselves hubs for progressive community engagement.

I work for a cultural and arts based organization so I spend a lot of time attending lectures of this sort. I absolutely love my job and I am able to meet and interact with people from a wide range of backgrounds and a variety of perspectives. I also have the opportunity to work with youth in my community and introduce them to the power and importance of creativity in all its forms. A lot of my work is what I would consider, "boots on the ground." I spend most of my time interacting with the wider, non-arts community, and working with people mostly ignored by society such as those experiencing homelessness, incarcerated youth, drop-outs, undocumented immigrant families, and students and teachers inside some of this country's lowest performing schools.

While my job is endlessly rewarding, I am often faced with situations within the art world that make me question the effectiveness of the industry in terms of tangible cultural and societal change. I often meet people working in the non-profit arts arena who are great artists with lofty ideals and bleeding hearts. I also meet a lot of people who are incredibly successful, interested in art, but woefully misinformed about the role and purpose of creativity in the 21st century.

In these circles I hear the word 'conversation' a lot. Phrases like, "let's have a conversation," or "this project is meant to spark a conversation," and "the only way to bridge the wealth, race, gender or class gap is to sit down and have a conversation." I get so tired of that word, conversation. On the surface, talking to people is the best way to understand their perspectives. It is obviously a great place to start. But when does a conversation lead to action? When does a dialogue sparked from an arts perspective lead to actual change? From my view point, I would say rarely, if ever. When it does spearhead any sense of change, it is fleeting at best.

For many people simply having the conversation allows them to feel like they've contributed. They have made their voice heard, they have been validated and that's what's ultimately important. But for the most part, these people exist in an echo chamber where they only hear their own ideas regurgitated back to them. There is no real challenge. There is no real demand for action. There are just exclusive groups of like-minded people creating self-indulgent artistic conversations, patting themselves on the back, while trying to pass it off as activism or worse, cultural change.

I meet people who will endlessly complain about the dismal state of education, the economy, energy regulation, politics, and on and on. Santa Fe alone has a massive collection of community based arts organizations dealing with these issues, far more than a city of nearly 70,000 ought to have. Many of these organizations do great work, and I don't want to detract from them. But some arts based nonprofits, with massive budgets, engage in work that is essentially ineffective and irrelevant when attempting to deal with real world problems and cultural shifts facing our city. People are so focused on their utopia and sexy ideals that they see the world through rose colored glasses and ignore, if not perpetuate, the flaws of the status-quo. And Santa Fe isn't even the worst. In fact, I think most organizations in this city do the best they can and I respect that.

The Los Angeles based arts collective and its lecturer (we'll call him Joe) who showcased work in the Las Vegas, NM presentation is a prime example of an organization that claims their practice aims to to begin a conversation, yet the work they do is inaccessible to those who would have the most to offer (and gain) in such a setting. The lack of accessibility allows this organization to preach their deeply flawed mission with impunity.

The collective did a project called Breaking into Cars for Kids, in which they brought together children and parents to teach them how to break into locked cars as an exercise in parent/child interaction. This gave the presentation's audience quite a fit of the giggles, "Oh, how cute!" This was sold to us as a workshop really focused on the workings and mechanisms inside of vehicles. The end goal of the workshop was for children and parents to gain the knowledge of what it takes to break into a car that isn't yours, which is something I find problematic.

"For most kids (and adults), modern cars are simply these gleaming, aggressive-faced jellybeans that house air-conditioning units and MP3 players while they idle in traffic. But underneath their shiny surface lurks all manner of exciting machinery that needs some demystification. That’s where we come in. In this class, we'll focus on a few key aspects of cars, and our interactions with them, while learning a bit about the physics and mechanics behind how it all works. This is a hands-on workshop, with an actual car to break in and out of. Taught by car historian and inventor Jason Torchinsky, who has already successfully guided at least six children in Los Angeles towards a future in grand theft auto."

- This Art Collective doing a project in my Hometown (grr..)

(My Inner Dialogue): What the fuck? Breaking into cars is a crime. You better hope to fucking God that one of the kids involved in your workshop isn't killed trying to take his neighbors Mustang for a joy ride. This is so ridiculously irresponsible.

For me, this project is what happens when arts collectives aren't racially and culturally diverse. More than anything, this was an exercise in privilege with an absolute blind eye to the wider, gaping, implications. Not only were the families involved in this workshop racially white and nationally American, they were also absolutely above suspicion due not only to the color of their skin, but the shadow cast by this trendy LA based arts organization. This project operated unopposed, unchallenged and was marketed and facilitated by a liberal, arts based, community organization whose staff is also racially white. There was no one involved in this workshop who said, "Hey - what are we doing here? What message are we sending?

What would this workshop have looked like if it was black or Latino families? What about Muslim families or immigrant families? Wouldn't that have forced a more constructive conversation, the type of conversation this organization claims to spark? Even if this project was only designed for the least suspicious among us, only those of us who could get away with such a crime without being arrested or worse, why claim it is being used to broaden perspectives? We all know that white people, especially mid-western housewives and their angelic children are far above reproach. My sneaking suspicion is that they wanted to be controversial (breaking
into cars is so titillating), that's something that looks subversive when printed on a flyer and hung up at a coffee shop. But they didn't want to actually dive into
the diverse cultural implications an action like that can have for anyone who isn't white because that would have forced them to engage with people of color.

After the lecture, I asked Joe, "you say that your work is meant to broaden perspectives and introduce people to different cultures. But which people and whose culture? For example, with the project about breaking into cars, if this was my brother [a black man] learning to break into a vehicle, wouldn't he be at risk? He could be arrested or killed. Wouldn't this have meant something different if it was kids who look like me learning to break into cars?"

I think it's a fair question, but when I presented it to Joe, he was unable to answer in meaningful fashion. In fact, Joe seemed taken aback by my comments. He was not used to being challenged, that much was clear. As a professor at a highly respected California university, who was I as a 25 year old kid, to suggest that his work was self-indulgent, irresponsible, morally ambiguous and culturally blind?

To be fair, the idea of the project didn't bother me on the surface. In fact, I think the idea of teaching workshops about the mechanisms involved in vehicle maintenance, along with offering opportunities for parents to engage with their children, are both interesting and worthy endeavors. However, what the project ignored is so obvious it must be stated. Teaching an unlawful skill to white kids is seen as cheeky, cute and harmless without any subtext or introspection, simply a way for parents to bond with their children and have a bit of fun on a Saturday. But if the same project was facilitated using families from the North Side of Minneapolis or, or South Side Chicago or The War Zone in Albuquerque, or inner-city Detroit, this project would not have come across as quaint and adorable as it was presented. But would it have provoked a deeper conversation about crime, race, privilege, and inequality within the justice system? Would a project like that have positioned the collective on the side of real change and real dialogue? I don't know the answer, you tell me.

The breaking into cars project might seem like a mild indiscretion or one half-baked idea from an otherwise cutting edge and trendy arts collective. But unfortunately, that isn't the case. The collective did another project in which they brought together different art forms for a day of artistic immersion. It sounds great on the surface, right? The mediums included knitting, cooking and dressing in drag. "Oh how fun!" But did this project even attempt to discuss any of the systemic problems present in drag culture and by extension the inequality and hostility directed towards trans and trans questioning people? Nope, not by a long shot.

Here again, we have a project that is marketed as a platform to create cultural conversations, but doesn't bother itself with deep questions. They didn't, at any point, take a moment to discuss or even acknowledge the unique issues present in GLBTQIA community. Drag culture is not an art form like knitting. Knitting doesn't risk putting an individual on the fringes of society. Drag is a form of creative expression chosen by people trying to be their authentic selves in the few safe spaces available to them. For many people involved in this community, it's not a game or something to be appropriated by some hipster in a feather boa and hot pink heels. For the collective to not even approach the subject of inequality, violence and discrimination throughout such a project, when they write their grants on the premise that they actively engage in cultural dialogues meant to spark change, seems unfair. Especially when there are committed arts organizations boldly confronting real issues while competing for (and losing) the same financial support.

I honestly believe that art has the power to change lives. It changed mine. It opened up a world of possibilities that I never knew existed at a time when I was at my most vulnerable. I believe that creativity, in all its forms, can change the world and I have seen it in action. I also believe that artists have the ability to define their work in any number of ways and their practice is by no means required to have a 'message'. Art is certainly allowed to be fun and self-indulgent, a lot of the work I love is the embodiment of this type of approach. But you don't get to say you are involved in social change and cultural bridge building when in reality all you're doing is getting your problematic white friends together to fiddle with your cars and play dress up.

You can't be both self-indulgence, self-promoting while existing in a world where no one ever tells you you're wrong and say you're an activist, advocate and warrior. It doesn't work and if anything, it makes it harder for everyone else involved in real arts based cultural work to be taken seriously.

So how do arts organizations, artists, and creative practitioners interested in cultivating lasting change get the platform and funding they need to do real work? How do we take to task organizations which do the opposite of what they preach, especially if they are well funded and propped up by archaic views of innovation? How do we weed out self-indulgence in the social practice art world to make room for those with the vision and the empathetic capacity to positively impact their community, whether local, national or international?